Constitutional courts as veto players: Divorce and decrees in Italy

Abstract. This article argues that constitutional courts in Western European parliamentary systems should be integrated into discussions of how public policies are changed, rather than being viewed as an external veto point. It attempts to bridge a gap between a judicial politics literature that focuses on the micro–level of individual judges' votes and comparative scholarship that operates at the macro–level. A model for viewing constitutional courts as veto players, as a third institutional actor, is proposed and is then illustrated using the cases of legalizing divorce and blocking the executive reissuing decree laws in Italy. The model considers both the indirect and direct influences that constitutional courts can exert on the policy–making process. It also facilitates understanding and explaining the role of courts, as well as legislatures and executives, in conducting the interactions and bargaining that result in policy change.     

All Votes are Equal? Significant Legislation and Party Competition in the Danish Folketing

In nearly all studies on legislative party competition, all votes are treated equally. It is argued in this article that the cooperation between parties varies substantively depending on the type of legislation analysed. However, establishing a measure of the relative significance of votes has challenged legislative studies for decades. A novel measure for legislative significance is therefore proposed: length of debate. Using parliamentary votes from 23 legislative periods in the Danish parliament from 1953 to 2003 and debate length as measurement for bill significance, analyses are presented that focus on between‐party voting patterns on significant and non‐significant legislation and the presence, extent and features of legislative cartels is discussed. The results suggest that looking only at significant legislation reveals more clearly the legislative cartels within the legislature. These findings challenge the traditional assumption of treating parliamentary votes equally, and they allow for a better understanding of legislative cartels in the Folketing.     

Explaining the impact of new parties in the Western European party systems

ABSTRACT

In recent years, and particularly following the impact of the “great recession”, Western European party systems have undergone profound change. New parties have emerged and been successful, thus radically changing the structure of inter-party competition. So far, research on new parties has been mainly conducted from party-level and election-centred perspectives. Here, instead, we focus on party system innovation (PSInn), meaning the impact of new parties on Western European party systems, and on the factors that explain such impact, by adopting a systemic perspective and taking into account all the arenas where inter-party competition takes place (i.e. elections, parliaments and governments). For this purpose, this article relies on an original dataset on the performances of new parties in terms of votes, seats, and ministerial posts, covering about 350 elections and 670 governments in 20 countries, over the period 1945–2017. The results of the analysis show a notable increase in PSInn over the last decade, in particular with regard to the electoral and parliamentary arenas. Moreover, data show that PSInn in the electoral and the parliamentary arenas is mainly predicted by turnout change, while in the governmental arena is instead driven by the country’s economic performance.     

Precedents,parliaments, and foreign policy: historical analogy in the House of Commons vote on Syria

Abstract

This analysis investigates the role of historical analogies in the influence that parliaments have in foreign policy. Our empirical focus is the UK Parliament’s unusual opposition to the Prime Minister on UK involvement in Syria in 2013. The vote challenges many conventional expectations about the role of parliament in security affairs. Important in this vote were lessons learned and strategically used from UK participation in the intervention of Iraq in 2003. This argument is developed theoretically based on research on historical analogies: parliaments, ‘learn’ (primarily negative) lessons about past foreign policy events which guide parliamentary preferences and procedures and can enhance parliaments’ role in subsequent foreign policy. The article contributes to research on analogies by extending the logic to lessons on process. This use of precedents can offer more structurally oriented perspectives that translate critical junctures into reforms in procedures and policy-making practices.     

The elimination paradox: apportionment in the Democratic Party

To award delegates in their presidential primary elections, the US Democratic Party uses Hamilton’s method of apportionment after eliminating any candidates (and their votes) that receive less than 15% of the total votes cast. We illustrate how a remaining candidate may have his or her delegate total decline as a result of other candidates being eliminated; this leads to a new elimination paradox. We relate that paradox to the new states, no show, and population paradoxes and show that divisor methods are not susceptible to the elimination paradox. We conclude with instances in which the elimination paradox may occur in other contexts, including parliamentary systems.

     

Veto Players in Post-Conflict DDR Programs: Evidence From Nepal and the DRC

ABSTRACT

Under what conditions are Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programs successfully implemented following intrastate conflict? Previous research is dominated by under-theorized case studies that lack the ability to detect the precise factors and mechanisms that lead to successful DDR. In this article, we draw on game theory and ask how the number of veto players, their policy distance, and their internal cohesion impact DDR implementation. Using empirical evidence from Nepal and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we show that the number of veto players, rather than their distance and cohesion, explains the (lack of) implementation of DDR.     

Veto Players and Institutional Analysis

The veto players theory can be used to analyze all political systems regardless of regime (presidential or parliamentary), party system (one-, two-, or multiparty), and type of parliament (unicameral or multicameral). This paper develops the veto players theory to account for a series of important political phenomena: the difference between majoritarian and supermajoritarian institutions; the importance of absenteeism, or of political marginalization; the importance of agenda control and referendums; the reasons for government stability (parliamentary systems) and regime stability (presidential systems); the reasons for independence of bureaucracies, and judicial independence. All these phenomena are analyzed in a coherent way, on the basis of the same framework. Empirical evidence from existing literature corroborating the theory is provided.     

Reconsidering the Great Compromise at the Federal Convention of 1787: Deliberation and Agenda Effects on the Senate and Slavery

Conventional accounts of the Federal Convention of 1787 point to the many different compromises made at the convention, specifically the Great Compromise on representation and the Three‐Fifths Compromise on slavery. Often these compromises are treated as separate events, the result of deliberation leading to moderation of delegate positions (presumably among the key states of Massachusetts and North Carolina). However, by applying the techniques of roll‐call analysis, we find this traditional account is at best incomplete and probably misleading. While the Massachusetts delegation's behavior seems consistent with a moderation hypothesis, we find evidence that the other crucial vote for the Great Compromise—from North Carolina—is inconsistent with moderation, but can be linked through the agenda to the Three‐Fifths Compromise over slavery, taxation, and representation. We conclude by arguing that this reconsideration of some of the convention's key votes should cause political scientists and historians to reevaluate how they see the compromises at the convention.     

Towards parliamentarisation of foreign and security policy?

Abstract

It is customary to argue that foreign policy is very much dominated by the executive, with parliaments wielding limited influence. However, with the exception of the US Congress, legislative?executive relations in the realm of foreign and security policy have attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. Drawing on a principal?agent framework, this collection scrutinises the conventional wisdom of ‘executive autonomy’ in foreign affairs, indicating that even though parliaments have arguably become more involved in foreign and security policy over time, any notions of parliamentarisation need to be treated with caution. While expectations of consensus in the name of the national interest continue to play an important role in foreign policy decision-making, the papers highlight the role of party-political contestation structuring parliamentary debates and votes in this increasingly politicised issue area. This introductory paper introduces the analytical framework and hypotheses guiding the contributions in this collection, summarises their main findings and suggests avenues for future research.     

Institutional veto players and cabinet formation: The veto control hypothesis reconsidered

Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi‐presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political‐institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context‐specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.     

Personal vote‐seeking in flexible list systems: How electoral incentives shape Belgian MPs' bill initiation behaviour

It is well known that different types of electoral systems create different incentives to cultivate a personal vote and that there may be variation in intra‐party competition within an electoral system. This article demonstrates that flexible list systems – where voters can choose to cast a vote for the list as ordered by the party or express preference votes for candidates – create another type of variation in personal vote‐seeking incentives within the system. This variation arises because the flexibility of party‐in‐a‐district lists results from voters' actual inclination to use preference votes and the formal weight of preference votes in changing the original list order. Hypotheses are tested which are linked to this logic for the case of Belgium, where party‐in‐a‐district constituencies vary in their use of preference votes and the electoral reform of 2001 adds interesting institutional variation in the formal impact of preference votes on intra‐party seat allocation. Since formal rules grant Belgian MPs considerable leeway in terms of bill initiation, personal vote‐seeking strategies are inferred by examining the use of legislative activity as signalling tool in the period between 1999 and 2007. The results establish that personal vote‐seeking incentives vary with the extent to which voters use preference votes and that this variable interacts with the weight of preference votes as defined by institutional rules. In addition, the article confirms the effect of intra‐party competition on personal vote‐seeking incentives and illustrates that such incentives can underlie the initiation of private members bills in a European parliamentary system.     

With a little help from my neighbours: A spatial analysis of the impact of local campaigns at the 2010 British general election

This article examines the electoral impact of spillover effects in local campaigns in Britain. For the first time, this is applied to the long as well as the short campaign. Using spatial econometric modelling on constituency data from the 2010 general election, there is clear empirical evidence that, in both campaign periods, the more a party spends on campaigning in constituencies adjacent to constituency i, the more votes it gets in constituency i. Of the three major political parties, the Liberal Democrats obtained the greatest electoral payoff. Future empirical analyses of voting at the constituency scale must, therefore, explicitly take account of spatial heterogeneity in order to correctly gauge the magnitude and significance of factors that affect parties' parliamentary performance.     

In Search of Successful Reform: The Politics of Opposition and Consensus in OECD Parliamentary Democracies

Why are some governments able to undertake controversial policy reforms and others are not? Conventional wisdom argues that single-party majority governments are best able to implement reforms because there are fewer veto actors within the government that can block the reforms. However, these accounts fail to consider the veto power of societal actors and particularly of trade unions, which can stall reform even in the presence of a unified executive. This paper argues that controversial reforms require broad societal and, consequently, political consensus, which are easier to achieve under minority governments or governments of broad coalitions. Evidence from 22 OECD parliamentary democracies over 35 years shows that minority and large coalition governments have been more successful in reducing social security contributions and pensions than narrower majority governments. This is especially true in countries where trade unions are militant and often resort to industrial action.     

Portugal's semi-presidentialism (re)considered: An assessment of the president's role in the policy process, 1976–2006

This article analyses the policy-making role of Portugal's heads of state in the period 1976–2006. Not only is Portugal rarely studied in the English language comparative literature, but there is no consensus concerning the proper definition of the country's system of government, whether it is semi-presidential or parliamentary. This article presents new data on the Portuguese president's role in the following areas: cabinet appointment and dismissal; parliamentary dissolution; ministerial appointments; referral of legislative bills to judicial review; veto powers; and agenda-setting through going-public tactics. It is concluded that the president's role in the policy process has never been irrelevant. While the 1982 constitutional reform did eliminate the possibility of undisguised presidential government, presidents have continued to be important in policy making, particularly due to use of their veto and dissolution powers. Therefore, the article argues that Portugal has remained solidly semi-presidential.     

The Bundesrat

Federal systems typically have in their legislative bodies asecond house designed to secure regional participation in nationalaffairs. While the German Bundestrat is not a co-equal branchof the parliament, it is, next to the U.S. Senate, the mostpowerful second (not "upper") house in existence. Unlike theU.S. Senate, its membership represents the cabinets of the elevenLänder, and votes are cast a bloc for each Land. The Bundesrathas an absolute veto over all bills that effect the Länderand a suspensive veto over all other bills. It was not designedas a partisan body, but partisan politics do sometimes enterthe decisionmaking process. The Bundesrat has served traditionallyas an institutional means of securing Land rights from intrusionby the federal government. Today, however, it is confrontedby a new and potentially more dangerous threat to Land autonomy:the growing power of the European Community and the trend towardrelinquishing important aspects of national sovereignty to ECinstitutions.     

Beyond committees: parliamentary oversight of coalition government in Britain

Abstract

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010?2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.     

Proportional Representation in the Welsh Assembly

The proposed rule for electing members to the Welsh Assembly gives each voter two votes, to cast at the Parliamentary constituency level, and at the bigger European constituency level. Half of the members are to be elected for the Assembly by a form of proportional representation, where party support is calculated by aggregating the two votes. The voters will be allowed to cast the second vote for a different party than the one for which they voted at the parliamentary level. This additional degree of freedom can frustrate the objective of obtaining better correspondence between party support and the number ofseats.     

De facto Veto? The Parliamentary Liberal Democrats

The parliamentary party of the Liberal Democrats is a symbol of the third party's growth in recent years. As a result of successful election targeting and an improvement in electoral reach, the party has seen its number of MPs at Westminster more than triple since 1992. It has been claimed that the increase in size of the parliamentary party has been accompanied by an increase in its power, so that the parliamentarians now have a de facto power of veto over policy despite the official policy-making structures as laid out in the Liberal Democrat constitution. This article investigates the make-up of the parliamentary Liberal Democrats and their contemporary influence over policy formation, and the parliamentary party's relationship with the conference and the party leader—and especially the events leading to the change of Liberal Democrat leader in 2006—to establish the veracity of this claim.     

Centripetal and Centrifugal Incentives under Different Electoral Systems

In a seminal article, Cox (1990) suggested that electoral systems with larger district magnitudes provide incentives for parties to advocate more extreme policy positions. In this article, we put this proposition to the test. Informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition, we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters. We then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes. Our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways. We find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules. By contrast, smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions. Evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions. Along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules, results carry implications for the strategies of vote‐maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition.     

Is there a selection bias in roll call votes? Evidence from the European Parliament

We examine the magnitude and significance of selection bias in roll call votes. Prior to 2009, all recorded (roll call) votes in the European Parliament had to be requested explicitly by European Political Groups. Since 2009, a roll call vote has been mandatory on all final legislative votes. We exploit that change in the rules and compare differences between final legislative votes, amendment votes and non-legislative votes before and after 2009, using a difference-in-differences approach with extensive controls. Using data from the Sixth (2004–2009) to Seventh (2009–2014) European Parliaments, we fail to find any large differences in voting cohesion for the main political groups. We find even less significance when we control for changes in parliamentary membership between those two periods. The results suggest that selection biases in the European Parliament associated with strategic choices are negligible.